The Group further categorises the selected articles in three broad categories and Prof Ong’s paper was one of the only four included in the emergency medicine development category. The compilation was published in the journal Academic Emergency Medicine in August 2022.
In Singapore, nearly 3,000 people have a sudden cardiac arrest every year in Singapore and about 30 per cent of these occur in public places rather than at home.
“In Asia-Pacific, pre-hospital emergency care systems are still underdeveloped and the survival rates here are low compared with countries that have more developed systems,” said Prof Ong, who is also Director of the Pre-hospital and Emergency Research Centre at Duke-NUS, about the study. “To increase the survival rates, we sought to find cost-effective solutions for implementation in these systems across all settings.”
In their study, Prof Ong and his collaborators from 12 countries in Asia Pacific aimed to evaluate the impact of dispatcher-assisted CPR on OHCA survival rates, where bystanders were guided through performing CPR by trained dispatchers over the telephone.